The Brief

Venmo is an app that allows users to send payments to other users for free,

Venmo makes it easy to send payments to other people through their app, but want to expand their services to make a difference in the world. With users accustomed to sending money quickly, Venmo would like to introduce a way for users to send money via their app to causes they care about—whether that be a nonprofit that combats hunger or a unique Kickstarter campaign. 

They want users to be able to see and track the funding of these causes in a way that encourages donations.

Problem Statement

Venmo, a digital wallet that lets you quickly make and share payments with friends, wants to expand their services and allow users to send money to causes they care about. They want users to be able to see and track the funding of these causes in a way that encourages donations.

Research

• First, we analyzed Venmo’s app in depth. We focused on:
  • Brand guidelines
  • Various flows within the app
  • Current features
  • Strengths vs. weaknesses

First, we need to decide what exactly we’re creating. We sent out a survey to allow the users to guide our feature. As we were building out our survey we realized we could take this many different directions. Will we be making a fundraiser feature, will we add a “change up” feature to allow users to round up their payments or will we allow organizations to collect money all in one place.

As we await our survey entries we jump right into competitive analysis.

• We conducted four interviews 
  • Varying demographics
  • Frequency of donation
  • Experience with Venmo
• We ran a survey
• We researched four competitive organizations
  • ChangeUp
  • Kickstarter
  • Patreon
  • GoFundMe

Survey

From here we decide on a survey. We really wanted to capture the needs of people wanting to donate. Who are our donators? How do they donate? Do they use Venmo? Could it benefit the business to use Venmo?

Click here for complete survey.

Solution Statement

Venmo, a digital wallet that lets you quickly make and share payments with friends, now offers the capability to make donations to the causes their users care for and support. Users will be able to quickly find and set up single or recurring donations as well as round up and donate when making payments and fulfilling requests. 

Users will be able to see the activity their friends are making in a way that encourages donations. 

Lastly, users will be able to track and measure their personal donations over time.

Feature Selection

After compiling our research we were able to narrow down what feature would be best for the first instillation of our new feature. We wanted to start simple but still wanted to give our users a few different options to donate.

We landed on…

• Roundup
• One time donation
• Monthly recurring donation

Site Map

From here we were able to create a site map. Venmo’s brand is extremely simple so we really wanted to stay true to that. We were able to repurpose one of the current pages (the global feed) that was found to have no user interest through our research. Honestly, the reorganization was all we need to get started. We were also able to add a second option to find the donations in the hamburger menu.

Rory’s Persona, User Flow and Journey Map

Now we were ready figure out our users.

Meet Rory.

We decided that Rory was going to be our “round up” persona. As a college student, you don’t always have a lot of extra funds but you still want to donate. Below you can see Rory “rounding up” as he goes to pay someone back.

For Rory’s Journey Map we really wanted to showcase the frustrations of being a broke college student but still wanting to donate. Below you can see the ups and downs of the donating process but also the ease in which he is able to see build up to a larger donation amount by slowly adding to his donation pot.

Jennifer’s Persona, User Flow and Journey Map

Meet Jennifer.

We decided that Jennifer was going to be our “reoccurring payments” persona. As a someone a little more established financially, Jennifer will set up payments each month to her favorite organization.

For Jennifer’s Journey Map we really wanted to showcase the desire to donate and then the ease of setting up reoccurring payments. Jennifer has made a budget and is ready to pick her favorite organization or two to start donating.

Wireframes

Now that we have our research, personas and user flows – we are ready to start our wireframes. Now, as we established Venmo has strong brand guidelines so we really only need to “design” a couple new pages and add a couple new buttons.

Rory’s Wireframes

Jennifer’s Wireframes

Usablity Testing

Before we moved on to the high fidelity mock-up’s we really wanted to get some testing done to see if we needed to move anything around. Again, with the Venmo brand being so strong the visuals should be pretty simple. For this brief it’s really about getting things in the right place for the users, really making sure that the user flow is simple, easy and clean. We were reminded that the goal is for the user to be able to donate at their ability.

Notes from two usability tests:

• User1 feedback for (Rory’s Flow): User expressed that he usually doesn’t send money in less than whole dollar amounts and that with the option of roundup to also add a ($.50, $1, $5, $10. etc) to the round up pop up 
  • Could be added to our next steps??
  • Validates what Kellie’s user said in the interview
  • Would be good to do A/B testing as next steps

• User 2 feedback for (Jennifer’s Flow): user was confused about what ‘round up’ meant on the My Donations page and thought it was asking if she wanted to round up her donation total at the top of the page. Her suggestion was to add an S so it says “Round Ups”.
  • Move All tab to the left, followed by Monthly > Round Ups

After some great feedback we were ready to move forward and really see this project come to life.

High fidelity Mock-ups

Rory’s Mock-Up

Jennifer’s Mock-up

Prototype

Invision Venmo Prototype

Conclusions

Overall, we were able to pull together a feature addition in two weeks. The client was extremely satisfied with the results.

Next steps, would be added more options for how people like to donate, such as campaigning and livestreams to build awareness to the cause and need for donations.